RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/09/3-reasons-you-should-stream-this-top-rated-classic-bbc-miniseries-right-now/

Now available to stream on YouTube, it’s time to discover why ‘Talking to a Stranger’ is considered one of the best television programs in British history.

In 1966, BBC-2 premiered the television drama “Talking to a Stranger.” Shown in four roughly 90-minute weekly installments in October of that year, the program was part of the BBC’s “Theatre 625” series, which aired from 1964 to 1968 and featured titles such as “1984,” “She Stoops to Conquer,” and “All’s Well That Ends Well.”

Many of the “Theatre 625” recordings have been lost, but “Talking to a Stranger” — which placed 78th in a 2000 British Film Institute ranking of the 100 greatest television programs in British history — is available for streaming on YouTube as well as in a boxed Judi Dench collection. Dench, who won the 1967 British Television Academy Best Actress Award for her role as the main character, Terry, is reason alone to watch “Talking to a Stranger,” but here are a few more.

As Relevant Today as in 1966

You might think a 55-year-old black-and-white British television show set in London, about an aging, middle-class married couple and their two adult children, would have nothing to say to contemporary Americans dealing with 21st-century problems. You would be wrong.

Indeed, “Talking to a Stranger” is about the things humans across the centuries have grappled with: dysfunctional relationships, mental health issues, poor life decisions, and the consequences of those decisions. The main characters struggle with fear, anger, resentment, guilt, and regret. There isn’t a clear-cut hero or villain.

And, much as we do in our own lives, the players in “Talking to a Stranger” each take turns at being both the victim and the perpetrator of hurt. At times, it’s almost painful to watch. Why? Because it’s all too real.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2020/12/07/the-feminists-gambit-a-skeptical-take-on-netflixs-the-queen-gambit-n1196739

At one time Chess was the reigning passion of my life, amounting almost to an obsession. I regularly visited the chess clubs in Old Montreal and played scrappy games with strangers on linoleum “boards” with chintzy plastic pieces. In time I acquired an extensive library of chess books and fell in love with opening theory, which I studied assiduously. I had a chess table built for me, bought a set of lovely hand-carved rosewood pieces, set about analyzing the games of the masters, and played as often as I could with friends, students and chess buffs. 

Soon it seemed I was doing little else. Montreal had become a mecca for chess tournaments, provincial, interzonal and international, which I devotedly attended. It was at the Tournament of Stars, sponsored by Quebec’s major French newspaper La Presse, that I met grandmaster Robert Hübner, then ranked sixth in the world. We became close friends over the years. Robert would visit me in Montreal and twice he spent summers with my family on the Greek island of Alonissos, where he would prepare for various international matches. As a friendly test and on a whim, I once asked Robert to set up the pieces as they were on the 18th move in the 27th game of the Alekhine-Capablanca 1927 World Championship match in Buenos Aires. It took him only a few seconds to reproduce the formation. 

By that time chess had become the center of my life. Though I never played in formal competitions, Robert assigned me a hypothetical rating of 1700, which falls into the FIDE Class B category. Eventually I came to understand chess as one of the great metaphors for life and published a book of poems, Chess Pieces, in which each chess piece, the various rules and the major opening gambits, stood allegorically for some aspect of human relationships.

Though many years have passed, my fascination with the game has never entirely waned. Thus, when Netflix featured the pseudo-biopic The Queen’s Gambit, based on the Walter Tevis novel of that title, which appears to have ignited a chess boom across the country, I couldn’t help binge-watching the career and exploits of chess prodigy Beth Harmon—Tevis’ “tribute to brainy women,” as he told The New York Times. The series (like the book) was quite mesmerizing—a gripping narrative of a young girl surmounting childhood trauma to reach the pinnacle of the chess world, with excellent production values, and snatches of games cloned from the manuals—which many commentators have fulsomely praised. And yet I found myself naggingly dissatisfied with the affair. Too much detracted from the aura of authenticity which the series aspired to.

To begin with, although there have been (and are) amazing women chess players, they were always few in number. This was not because they were held back by the “Patriarchy.” In the Soviet Union, Israel, and other nations, they were coddled and subsidized, but never reached the status of the very top world-class male grandmasters. The closest any woman ever came to winning an Open World Championship was the extraordinary Judit Polgar of Hungary, who finished last of eight participants in the 2005 San Luis Invitational, losing to Veselin Topalov, though she was playing White. 

http://politicalmavens.com/

While the Times offers David Kelley and Hugh Grant a chance to slap each other on the backs for the finale of “The Undoing,” word of mouth offers an abundance of disgruntled watchers who sat through the multiple inaccuracies of life on the upper east side expecting something unexpected as a payoff. Not only did we find out that the obvious was the right answer all along, but we learned that there were hidden references in this mediocre melodrama. Turns out that “The Undoing” was really about Trump, another narcissistic man who of course can be compared to a psychopathic killer because in the words of Hugh Grant, “he knows intellectually that he lost the election, but when he’s arguing that it was fixed, he believes every word of it.” (NYTimes 12/2/2020) Other deep thoughts are offered by screenwriter Kelley, ” Power and money accomplish results that are not available to ordinary people.” And this “He (actor Hugh Grant) really wanted him to be a monster….He really wanted to go for it. He urged us to make him a monster.”

Perhaps Trump Derangement Syndrome may explain some of the other inscrutable plot points that occur throughout, particularly Nicole Kidman’s somnambulistic walks through Harlem and Central Park at night, once in her bathrobe; Hugh Grant’s “doctor” appearing at school next to his paramour and their baby while the children are being dismissed; the lovely Elena coming to the benefit committee meeting after all its preparations have been completed; the young son choosing to protect his father – not by throwing the bloody hammer in the CEntral Park reservoir across the street, but by giving it two runs in the dishwasher; and perhaps most peculiarly, Nicole Kidman’s flaming hairstyle worn by this Harvard educated doctor of psychology as she counsels her troubled patients. Never mind penis envy – here’s something female patients can really lash into.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/review-the-way-i-see-it-obama-dream-worshipful-documentaries/?utm_source=recirc-

Two new worshipful documentaries tie in to #44’s propagandizing memoir.

‘How can we miss you when you won’t go away?” political podcaster Yvette Carnell joked two years ago when Barack Obama began his comeback tour by making sideline pronouncements about the state of the nation after his brief retirement. Now the comeback is official, with two new Kool-Aid-drinker Obama hagiographies to prove it.

Obama Dream and The Way I See It are released in theaters and on streaming like promotional tie-ins to accompany the publication of Obama’s latest literary memoir, The Promised Land. Both films provide audiovisual aid to the 800-plus-page book. Reliance on pictorial persuasion in these docs brings to mind how friendly the media coverage of Obama has always been, in contrast to the media hostility aimed at George W. Bush and Donald Trump. It’s the B.O. and A.O. media — journalism Before Obama and After Obama.

Almost four years since the Obama administration walked from the White House to its Kalorama bunker near the White House, these documentaries remind us of what that media thrall from 2008 to 2016 was like. (Full disclosure: I had to devote a large section of my book Make Spielberg Great Again to Obama’s debilitating artistic influence.)

Obama Dream was made by Italian filmmaker Francesco Pavarati, who followed the 2008 campaign stops, traveling 20,000 miles from Denver through 14 states to Election Night, giving the perspective of an infatuated outsider. Pavarati is astounded by the candidate and aghast at America itself. He offers fever-dream imagery of a nation as bewitched and enraptured as he was and apparently still is.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/11/british_royalty_and_why_you_shouldnt_trust_tv.html

At a moment when Britain is disquieted by scandal about Prince Andrew, disgraced for his friendship with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein; the ongoing drama of Megxit, the withdrawal of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle from royal duties; and the rift between the two royal brothers, William and Harry, the British TV soap opera, ten episodes of The Crown, season 4, has appeared to provide alleged entertainment of the doings of the British Royal Family.

Because it is lavishly produced, well written, carefully acted, and cleverly invented, it is easy to accept The Crown as an accurate representation of a twenty-year period in British history.  However, no one should be confused.  It is not a documentary of the life and behavior of Queen Elizabeth II, members of the Royal Family and associates, in the stately homes of Buckingham Palace, Windsor, and Balmoral, and the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.  Rather, it is a psychodrama written with what can generously be termed artistic license about the actions and motivations of the leading figures.

Some of the invented incidents in The Crown can be noted.  Discussions concerning Lord Mountbatten and Prince Charles, or the supposed political dialogue between Queen Elizabeth II and Michael Fagan, who infiltrated Buckingham Palace and spoke to the queen in her bedroom, or the tension with Margaret Thatcher because of personal concerns about the safety of her son and public concerns over the Falklands war, are not accurate representations of history.  In particular, all of the remarks of Elizabeth, who bestrides the series as a colossus, are invented.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/hillbilly-elegy-ron-howards-inverted-mayberry/

Americana for our age: Booze, opioids, and ignorance. But Glenn Close, at least, sails past the white-trash clichés.

Amy Adams stars in Hillbilly Elegy (Lacey Terrell/Netflix) Americana for our age: Booze, opioids, and ignorance. But Glenn Close, at least, sails past the white-trash clichés.

Hollywood knows two registers when it comes to the white working class (WWC): sentimentalizing and condescending. WWCs are either cute, neighborly, and folksy, or they constitute a tawdry, alien life form. There are 130 million WWCs in our country, and yet nobody in Hollywood has the slightest grasp of them. With the plucky rural folk, it’s always about hearts overflowing with kindness or sinks overflowing with dirty dishes. Their veins surge with either the American dream or opioids.

Ron Howard’s career got rolling in one WWC cliché — Mayberry, on The Andy Griffith Show — and now he’s traveled a great distance to indulge another, the Middletown, Ohio, recalled so memorably and with such wounded pride by J. D. Vance in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy.

Howard’s movie adaptation for Netflix recounts the events of Vance’s book but lacks the feel, the personality. So much of its power was in its authorial voice, as was the case with Frank McCourt’s 1996 memoir Angela’s Ashes, which was poorly adapted by Alan Parker in a 1999 film. Hillbilly Elegy the movie has much in common with Parker’s film: It’s an Appalachian Angela’s Ashes. If Vance’s book was a page-turner with a message, Howard’s film is just one damn thing after another: fights, screaming matches, drug sprees, shoplifting episodes, police interactions. It gets to be unintentionally comic at times.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/hillbilly_elegy_effectively_addresses_the_crisis_of_modernity_as_one_of_a_deficit_of_values.html

The movie Hillbilly Elegy is an outstanding portrayal of what life is like for many in the white working class.

I was a little apprehensive since I read the book by J.D. Vance and really enjoyed it, but all of the three reviews I read for the movie based on the book, were negative.

And one thing they tended to say was that the movie is a cartoonish portrayal of what many call “white trash” and the performances of Amy Adams and Glenn Close weren’t worthy of the topic.

But after seeing it, I would strongly disagree. I would go so far as to say that both deserve Academy Awards for such unbelievably great performances. Although Adams got top billing as J.D. Vance’s mother Bev, Glenn Close may have stolen the show with her portrayal of J.D. Vance’s grandmother whom he calls “Mamaw.”

J.D. Vance himself appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show Monday night, where they briefly discussed the movie and book based on his life towards the end of the interview.

Tucker asked him why the reviews have been so negative when Vance put his finger right on answer when he said it was, and I’m paraphrasing, the bigotry of the elitist journalist class that don’t like and would prefer not to see any movies about the struggles of the white working class in America, especially as it relates to those on the lower end who are living on the razor’s edge of surviving and falling into poverty. The only movies they prefer are those such as The Blind Side and others tell that tell the ‘heart-warming’ stories of how people of color who are living in poverty but end up succeeding in life out of the charity of white Americans that are sure to make viewers warm and fuzzy all over as they walk out of the theaters. Carlson ended the discussion with a comment about how elitists just hope middle- and lower-class whites just die and go away, which is exactly what’s been happening due to globalism.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/obamagate-movie-mark-tapson/

As the Democrat Party moves from one duplicitous, often illegal anti-Trump operation to another without pause (such as presidential impeachment and massive, nationwide voter fraud), their earlier scandals – even recent ones – get pushed into the background of our memory. As an example: the Deep State sabotage of the 2016 Trump campaign and presidency known as “ObamaGate,” which President Trump described as “the biggest political crime in American history, by far.” Charles Lipson at Real Clear Politics wrote that ObamaGate’s abuses of power “represent some of the gravest violations of constitutional norms and legal protections in American history… The entrenched elites behind these scandals are the Swamp at its most sulfurous. They spied illegally on Americans and used powerful tools of government to damage the party-out-of-power, its outsider candidate, and then his new presidency.”

This would be great fodder for a gripping Hollywood drama – except that Hollywood doesn’t dramatize Democrat abuses of power. So it fell to conservative filmmakers, award-winning journalists, and bestselling authors Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer to capture the essence of the scandal on film for posterity.

Co-produced by the Unreported Story Society and Tom Fitton’s Judicial Watch, ObamaGate: The Movie, available to watch for free here on YouTube, exposes the Deep State plot to subvert the Trump candidacy and presidency, and lays bare the lies behind the Russian collusion hoax relentlessly perpetuated by the Democrats and their abettors in the mainstream news media. Filmed in Los Angeles on the Comedy Central stage at the Hudson Theater, it stars openly-conservative actor Dean Cain, best-known as TV’s Superman, and Kristy Swanson, formerly TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as “FBI lovebird” agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. It also features familiar face John James from the Dynasty TV series as Obama administration FBI Director James Comey.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/mbc-tv-drama-series-umm-haroun-rocking-arab-world-joseph-puder/

For over a century, ever since the Zionist project began, Jews have been vilified in the Arab press as usurpers of Palestine. There were also the religious aspects in the condemnation of Jews as evildoers and enemies of the prophet Mohammad. Even after the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, the Egyptian media viciously portrayed Jews using such old medieval calumnies as accusations that Jews kill children to use their blood on Passover matzos. Israel’s peace with Jordan in 1994 did not do much to improve how the Jordanian people saw Israel and Jews. In short, the governments of both Egypt and Jordan failed to prepare their people for peaceful people to people relationships.

The recent Abrahamic peace treaties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain signed in the White House, with the President Donald Trump serving as the facilitator, has brought on a refreshing air of amity and positivity. It is a more real peace that is not just between governments, but rather has the people on sides involved, as well as in business relations, and two-way tourism. The Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC), an Emirati-Saudi media conglomerate based in Dubai has presented a drama series called “Umm Haroun,” aired during month of the Ramadan fast, a major TV audience occasion, especially with the coronavirus keeping many people at home, thus increasing the watching audience. The series explores the Jewish roots in the Gulf, and the historic ties Jewish people have to the Arab Gulf region.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/what-killed-michael-brown-mark-tapson/

In the wake of the violent worldwide protests that followed the death in police custody of black Minneapolis resident George Floyd, it is easy to forget that what created the conditions for all that racial chaos was the 2014 shooting of black Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Yes, the Black Lives Matter movement began before that, after George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. But BLM didn’t pick up steam and acquire national recognition until after Brown. And Zimmerman wasn’t a cop; it was Michael Brown’s death that really galvanized what author Heather Mac Donald called “the war on cops” and created the mythic slogan, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” which the leftist news media promoted in spite of an absence of evidence or witnesses that Brown ever said it.

The brilliant scholar Shelby Steele has now revisited that complex tragedy in a new documentary called What Killed Michael Brown?, written and narrated by Steele, and beautifully directed and filmed by his award-winning filmmaker son Eli. Steele père, you will remember, is the black conservative author of The Content of Our Character and White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. His film seeks to answer what Steele calls “a daring question, one that a group like Black Lives Matter would forbid: is Michael Brown in any way responsible for his own death?”

What Killed Michael Brown? is grounded by Steele’s calm, thoughtful presence and his almost poetic narration, delivered in a measured, mellifluent voice and backed by a moody, jazz trumpet soundtrack. The film features him strolling down the streets of Ferguson, in his childhood home in Chicago, and in neighborhoods of the black underclass in both cities as he muses about the nature of race, power, and character in America. This is woven in with footage of riots and press conferences, and interviews with white Ferguson residents, local black leaders, and even race hustler Al Sharpton, whom Steele depicts as a self-aggrandizing agitator exploiting black anger.